As most of the world is still dealing with the worst economic crisis in decades, Japan is currently being considered as the potential host for the International Linear Collider (ILC), a multi-billion-dollar machine that will smash atoms at higher and higher energy levels.

As the Large Hadron Collider has been unable to find any of the particles suggested by supersymmetry, theoretical particle physicists are trying to change their worldview, away from supersymmetry to theories that could explain the results.

A new tabletop experiment using a single photon was proposed to show whether space-time is made up of indivisible units. Space isn’t smooth, and physicists think that on the quantum scale, it is composed of indivisible subunits, like the dots of a pointillist drawing. This pixelated landscape is thought to be populated by black holes, smaller than one trillionth of one trillionth of the diameter of a hydrogen atom, which continuously pop in and out of existence.

While Sherlock Holmes might have stated that the absence of any evidence is evidence itself, theoretical physicists haven’t yet been able to find any inkling to confirm supersymmetry (SUSY), a theory which predicts that every Standard-Model particle has a heavier partner. The reason why SUSY is so important is because it would be a step forward towards a grand unified theory of particles and forces.

In July, physicists at the Large Hadron Collider announced the discovery of a new particle that looked like the Higgs boson. This particle was never perfect; but based on the available data, it looked exactly what the Standard Model of Particle Physics predicted the Higgs would look like.

A photon can act as a particle one moment, following a well-defined path like a tiny projectile, and a wave the next, overlapping with its ilk to produce interference patterns, much like a ripple on the water. Wave-particle duality is one of the key features of quantum mechanics, and it’s not easily understood in layman’s terms. New experiments show that photons not only switch from wave to particle and back again, but they can actually hold both wave and particle tendencies at the same time.